The Balladists

In the time when fairies still tripped the moonlit sward, they received praise and compliment indeed from the mouths of their human kin, but it was more out of fear than out of love. They were the 'Men of Peace' and the 'Good Neighbours' for a reason not much different from that which caused the Devil's share in the churchyard to be known as the 'Guid Man's Croft,' lest by speaking more frankly of those having power, evil might befall. The tenancy of brake and woodland in the 'witching hours' by this uncanny people was a formidable addition to the terrors of the night:

'Up the craggy mountainAnd down the rushy glen,We dare not go a-huntingFor fear of Little Men.Wee folk, good folk,Trooping altogether,Green jerkin, red cap,And white owl's feather.'

They were tricksy, capricious, peevish, easily offended, malicious if not wholly malevolent, and dangerous alike to trust and to thwart. All this, together with their habit of trooping in procession and dancing under the moon; their practice of snatching away to their underground abodes those who, by kiss or other spell, fall into their hands; and the penance or sacrifice which at every seven years' term they pay to powers still more dread, comes out in the tale of True Thomas's adventure with the Queen of Faëry, and in Fair Janet's ordeal to win back Young Tamlane to earth. Their prodigious strength, so strangely disproportioned to their size, is celebrated in the quaint lines of The Wee Wee Man; while from The Elfin Knight we learn that woman's wit as well as woman's faith can, on occasion, prove a match for all the spells and riddles of fairyland. The enchanted horn is heard blowing —

'A knight stands on yon high, high hill,Blaw, blaw, ye cauld winds blaw!He blaws a blast baith loud and shrill,The cauld wind 's blawn my plaid awa,'

and, at the spoken wish, the Elfin Knight is at the maiden's side. But the spell the tongue has woven, the tongue can unloose; and the lady brings her unearthly lover first into captivity by setting him a preliminary task to perform, more baffling than that 'sewing a sark without a seam.'

It is otherwise with True Thomas, as it was with Merlin before him, and with all the men, wise and foolish, who have once yielded to the glamourie of the Elfin Queen and others of her type and sex. The Rhymer of Ercildoune was probably only a man more learned and far-seeing than others of his time. His reputation for Second Sight may rest upon a basis similar to that which led the mediæval mind to dub Virgil a magician, and to recognise the wizard in Sir Michael Scott, the grave ambassador and counsellor of kings, and, at a later date, enabled the profane vulgar to discover a baronet of Gordonstoun to be a warlock, for no better reason than because, with the encouragement of that most indefatigable of ballad collectors, Samuel Pepys, he gave his attention to the perfecting of sea-pumps for the royal navy. Whether the Rhymer's expedition to Fairyland was feigned by the balladist to explain his soothsaying; or whether, rather, his prophecies were invented as evidence of the perilous gift he brought back with him from Elfland, research will never be able to tell us. But the journey True Thomas made on the fateful day when, lying on Huntlie bank,

'A ferlie he spied wi' his e'e;And there he saw a ladye brightCome riding down by the Eildon Tree,'

was one that many heroes of adventure, before him and after him, have made in fairy lands forlorn. The scenery and incidents of that strange ride are also among the common possessions of fairy romance. One dimly discerns in them the glimmer of an ancient allegory, of an old cosmogony, that may possibly be derived from the very infancy of the world, when human thought began to brood over the mysteries of life and time. There are the Broad Path of Wickedness and the Narrow Way of Right, and between them that 'bonnie road' of Fantasy, winding and fern-sown, that leads to 'fair Elfland.' There is a glimpse of the Garden of the Hesperides and its fruits; and a lurid peep into Hades:'It was mirk, mirk nicht and nae starlicht,

And they waded through red bluid to the knee;For a' the bluid that 's shed on earthRins through the springs o' that countrie.'

The Palace of Truth as well as of Error is built on fairy ground; and there is a foretaste of Gilbertian humour in the dismay with which the Rhymer hears that he is to be endowed with 'the tongue that can never lie.'

'"My tongue is mine ain," True Thomas said;"A goodlie gift you would give me;I neither dought to buy or sellAt fair or tryst where I may be;I dought neither speak to prince or peerNor ask of grace from fair ladye."'

But from his seven years' wanderings in fairyland, that speed like a day upon earth, he wakens up as from a dream, and again he is laid on Huntlie bank, in sight of the cleft Eildon.

Is it not significant that Melrose and Abbotsford, where a later and greater wizard wrought his spells over the valley of the Tweed and Ettrick Forest, should be half-way between the chief scenes of our Fairy Ballads – between the Rhymer's Tower and Carterhaugh? Fair Janet's conduct, when forbidden to come or go by Carterhaugh, where Yarrow holds tryst with Ettrick, lest she might encounter the Young Tamlane, may be traced back to the Garden of Eden, and is of a piece with that of Mother Eve:

'Janet has kilted her green kirtleA little abune her knee;And she has braided her yellow hairA little abune her bree;And she 's awa' to CarterhaughAs fast as she could gae.'

There she falls in with the 'elfin grey' who might have been an 'earthly knight'; and he tells her how, as a youth, he had been reft away to fairyland:

'There cam' a wind out o' the north,A sharp wind and a snell;A deep sleep cam' over meAnd from my horse I fell';

as happened to 'Held Harald' and his men in the German legend. But he also tells her how, by waiting at the cross road at midnight on Halloweve, 'when fairy folk do ride,' she may win back the father of her child to mortal shape. That waiting on the dreary heath while 'a north wind tore the bent,' and what followed, become the ordeal of Janet's love:

'Aboot the dead hour o' the nightShe heard the bridles ring;And Janet was as glad o' thatAs any earthly thing.And first gaed by the black, black steed,And then gaed by the brown,But fast she gripped the milk-white steedAnd pu'ed the rider down';

and holding her lover fast, through all his gruesome changes of form, she 'borrowed' him from the 'seely court,' and saved him from becoming the tribute paid every seven years to the powers that held fairydom in vassalage.

Another series of transmutations, familiar in ballad and folklore, is that in which the powers of White and Black Magic strive for the mastery, generally to the discomfiture of the latter, after the manner of the Hunting of Paupukewis in Hiawatha. The baffled magician or witch – often the mother-in-law or stepmother, the stock villain of the piece in these old tales – alters her shape rapidly to living creature or inanimate thing; but fast as she changes the avenger also changes, pursues, and at length destroys. In the ballad of The Twa Magicians, given in Buchan's collection, it is virtue that flees, and wrong, in the shape of a Smith, of Weyland's mystic kin, that follows and overcomes.

But, as a rule, the transformations that are made the subject of the Scottish ballads are of a more lasting kind; the prince or princess, tempted by a kiss, or at the touch of enchanted wand or ring, is doomed for a time to crawl in the loathly shape of snake or dragon about a tree, or swim the waters as mermaid or other monstrous brood of the seas of romance, until the appointed time when the deliverer comes, and by like magic art, or by the pure force of courage and love, looses the spell. Kempion is a type of a class of story that runs, in many variations, through the romances of chivalry, and from these may have been passed down to the ballad-singer, although ruder forms of it are common to nearly all folk-mythology. The hero is one of those kings' sons, who, along with kings' daughters, people the literature of ballad and märchen; and he has heard of the 'heavy weird' that has been laid upon a lady to haunt the flood around the Estmere Crags as a 'fiery beast.' He is dared to lean over the cliff and kiss this hideous creature; and at the third kiss she turns into

'The loveliest ladye e'er could be.'

The rescuer asks —

'O, was it wehrwolf in the wood,Or was it mermaid in the sea?Or was it man, or vile womán,My ain true love, that misshapéd thee?'

Nor do we wonder to hear that it was the doing of the wicked and envious stepmother, on whom there straight falls a worse and a well-deserved weird. In King Henrie, too, it is the stepdame that has wrought the mischief. He is lying 'burd alane' in his hunting hall in the forest, when his grey dogs cringe and whine; the door is burst in, and

'A grisly ghostStands stamping on the floor.'

The manners of this Poltergeist are in keeping with her rough entrance on the scene; her ogreish appetite is not satisfied even when she had devoured his hounds, his hawks, and his steed. As in the Wife of Bath's Tale, and the Marriage of Sir Gawain and other legends of the same type, the knight's courtesy withstands every test, and he is rewarded for having given the lady her will:

'When day was come and night was ganeAnd the sun shone through the ha',The fairest ladye that e'er was seenLay between him and the wa'.'

In most cases it is not wise or safe to give entertainment to these wanderers of the night, whether they come in fair shape or in foul. They are apt to prove to be of the race of the succubi, from whom a kiss means death or worse. More than one of our Scottish ballads are reminiscent of the beautiful old Breton lay, The Lord Nann, so admirably translated by Tom Taylor, wherein the young husband, stricken to the heart by the baleful kiss given to him against his will by a wood-nymph, goes home to die, and his fair young wife follows him fast to the grave. Alison Gross is another of those Circes who, by incantation of horn and wand, seek to lower the shape and nature of her lovers to those of the beasts that crawl on their bellies. Sometimes the tempter is of the other sex. Thus The Demon Lover is a tale known in several versions in Scotland, and lately brought under notice by Mr. Hall Caine in its Manx form. The frail lady is enticed from her home, and induced to put foot on board the mysterious ship by an appeal, a pathetic echo of which has lingered on in later poetry, and has been quoted as the very dirge of the Lost Cause:

'He turned him right and round about,And the tear blindit his e'e;"I would never have trodden on Irish groundIf it hadna been for thee."'

They have not sailed far, when his countenance changes, and he grows to a monstrous stature; the foul fiend is revealed. They are bound on a drearier voyage than that of True Thomas – to a Hades of ice and isolation that bespeaks the northern origin of the tale:

'"O whaten a mountain 's yon," she said,"So dreary wi' frost and snow?""O yon 's the mountain of hell," he cried,"Where you and I must go."He strack the tapmast wi' his hand,The foremast wi' his knee;And he brake the gallant ship in twainAnd sank her in the sea.'

Other spells and charms not a few, for the winning of love and the slaking of revenge, are known to the old balladists. We hear of the compelling or sundering power of the bright red gold and the cold steel. Lovers at parting exchange rings, as in Hynd Horn, gifted with the property of revealing death or faithlessness:

'When your ring turns pale and wan,Then I 'm in love wi' another man.'

Or, as in Rose the Red and Lily Flower, it is a magic horn, to be blown when in danger, and whose notes can be heard at any distance. These are examples of the 'Life Token' and the 'Faith Token,' known to the folklore of nearly all peoples who have preserved fragments of their primitive beliefs. The prophetic power of dreams is revealed in The Drowned Lovers, in Child Rowland, in Annie of Lochryan, and in a host of others. The spells used by witchcraft to arrest birth do not differ greatly in Willie's Lady– the 'nine witch-knots,' the 'bush of woodbine,' the 'kaims o' care,' and the 'master goat' – from those mentioned in its prototypes in Scandinavian, Greek, and Eastern ballads and stories; and in more than one it is the sage counsels of 'Billy Blin'' – the Brownie – that give the cue by which the evil charm is unwound. The Brownie – the Lubber Fiend – owns a department of legend and ballad scarcely less important than that possessed by his relatives, the Elfin folk and the Trolds; a shy and clumsy monster, but harmless and good-natured, and with a turn for hard manual labour that can be turned to useful account. Good and ill fortune, in the ballads, comes often by lot:

'We were sisters, sisters seven,Bowing down, bowing down;The fairest maidens under heaven;And aye the birks a' bowing.And we keest kevils us amang,Bowing down, bowing down;To see who would to greenwood gang,And aye the birks a' bowing.'

The birk held a high place in the secret rites and customs of the Ballad Age. It was with 'a wand o' the bonnie birk' that May Margaret went through the mysterious process of restoring her plighted troth to Clerk Saunders; in other ballads it is done by passes of the hand, or of a crystal rod. When the 'Clerk's Twa Sons o' Owsenford' were brought back to earth by their mother's bitter grief and longing, they wore 'hats made o' the birk':

'It neither grew in syke or ditch,Nor yet in ony sheugh;But at the gate of ParadiseThat birk grew green eneuch.'

Birds of the air carry a secret; there are tongues in trees that syllable men's names; and even inanimate things cry aloud with the voice of Remorse or of Doom. When the knight wishes to send a message, he speaks in the ear of his 'gay goshawk that can baith speak and flee.' When May Colvin returns home after the fatal meeting at the well, where her seven predecessors in the love of the 'Fause Sir John' had been drowned, the 'wylie parrot' speaks the words that were no doubt ringing in her brain:

'What hae ye made o' the fause Sir JohnThat ye gaed wi' yestreen?'

And in Earl Richard and other ballads, it is the 'popinjay' that proclaims guilt or fear from turret or tree. One remembers also 'Proud Maisie' walking early in the wood, and Sweet Robin piping her doom among the green summer leaves:

'"Tell me, my bonnie bird,When shall I marry me?""When six braw gentlemenKirkward shall carry thee"';

and the 'Three Corbies' croaking the most grim and dismal notes in all the wide, wild range of ballad poetry, as they feast on the new-slain knight:

'Ye 'll sit on his white hause bane,And I 'll pike oot his bonnie blue een;Wi' ae lock o' his yellow hairWe 'll theak our nest when it is bare.O mony a ane for him maks mane,But nae ane kens whaur he is gane,O'er his white banes when they are bareThe wind shall sigh for evermair.'

But things that have neither sense nor life utter aloud words of menace and accusation. Lord Barnard's horn makes the forest echo with the warning notes, 'Away, Musgrave, away!' Binnorie embalms the tradition of the 'singing bone' which pervades the folklore of the Aryan peoples, and is found also in China and among the negro tribes of West Africa. A harper finds the body of the drowned sister, and out of her 'breast-bane' he forms a harp which he strings with her yellow hair. According to a northern version of the ballad, he makes a plectrum from 'a lith of her finger bane.' On this strange instrument the minstrel plays before king and court, and the strings sigh forth:

'Wae to my sister, fair Helén!'

In other ballads, the yearning or remorse of the living draw the dead from their graves. In the tale of The Cruel Mother, we seem to see the workings of the guilty conscience, which at length 'visualised' the victims of unnatural murder. The bride goes alone to the bonnie greenwood, to bear and to slay her twin children:

'She 's wrapped her mantle about her head,All alone, and alonie O!She 's gone to do a fearful deedDown by the greenwood bonnie O!'

The crime and shame are hid; but peace does not come to her:

'The lady looked o'er her high castle wa',All alone and alonie O!She saw twa bonnie bairnies play at the ba'Down by yon greenwood bonnie O!

The mother's yearning awakens within her, and she promises them all manner of gifts if they will only be hers. But the voices of the ghost-children rise and pronounce judgment on her:

'O cruel mither, when we were thine,All alone and alonie O!From us ye did our young lives twine,Doon by yon greenwood bonnie O.'

Elsewhere in these old rhymes may be traced a superstitious belief, which was put in practice as a means of discovering guilt, at least as late as the middle of the seventeenth century – that of the Ordeal by Touch. In Young Benjie another test is applied to find the murderer; and at midnight the door of the death-chamber is set ajar, so that the wandering spirit may enter and reanimate for an hour the 'streikit corpse':

'About the middle of the nightThe cocks began to craw;And at the dead hour o' the night,The corpse began to thraw.'

It sat up; and with its dead lips told the waiting brethren on whose head justice, tempered with a strange streak of mercy, should fall for the foul slaughter of their 'ae sister':

'Ye maunna Benjie head, brothers,Ye maunna Benjie hang,But ye maun pyke oot his twa grey eenBefore ye let him gang.'

In Proud Lady Margaret, again, we have a form of the legend, told in many lands, and made familiar, in a milder form, by the classical German ballad of The Lady of the Kynast, of a haughty and cruel dame whose riddles are answered and whose heart is at length won by a stranger knight. She would fain ride home with him, but he answers her that he is her brother Willie, come from the other side of death to 'humble her haughty heart has gart sae mony dee':

'The wee worms are my bedfellowsAnd cauld clay is my sheets';

and there is no room in his narrow house for other company. Out of the Dark Country, too, on a similar errand, on Hallowe'en night, rides the betrayed and slain knight in Child Rowland, the first line of which, preserved in King Lear as it was known in Shakespeare's day, seems to strike a keynote of ballad romance:

'Child Rowland to the dark tower came,'

mumbles the feigned madman in the ear of the poor wronged king as they tread the waste heath. And the sequel, as it has come down to us, sustains and strengthens the spell of the opening:

'And he tirled at the pin;And wha sae ready as his fause love,To rise and let him in.'

The passages that describe the haunted ride in the moonlight, when the lady has fled from the scene of her treachery and guilt, are not surpassed in weird imaginative power, if they are equalled, by anything in ballad or other literature:

'She hadna ridden a mile, a mile,Never a mile but ane,When she was 'ware o' a tall young manRiding slowly o'er the plain.She turned her to the right about,And to the left turned she;But aye 'tween her and the wan moonlightThat tall knight did she see.'

She set whip and spur to her steed, but 'nae nearer could she get'; she appealed to him, as from a 'saikless,' or guiltless, maid to 'a leal true knight,' to draw his bridle-rein until she can come up with him:

'But nothing did that tall knight say,And nothing did he blin;Still slowly rade he on before,And fast she rade behind,'

until he drew rein at a broad river-side. Then he spoke:

'"This water it is deep," he said,"As it is wondrous dun;But it is sic as a saikless maid,And a leal true knight can swim."'

They plunged in together, and the flood bore them down:

'"The water is waxing deeper still,Sae does it wax mair wide;And aye the farther we ride on,Farther off is the other side."· · · · ·The knight turned slowly round aboutAll in the middle stream,He stretched out his hand to that lady,And loudly she did scream."O, this is Hallow-morn," he said,"And it is your bridal day;But sad would be that gay weddingWere bridegroom and bride away.But ride on, ride on, proud Margaret,Till the water comes o'er your bree;For the bride maun ride deep and deeper yetWho rides this ford wi' me."'

But the perturbed spirit does not always thus revisit the glimpses of the moon to awaken conscience, to humble pride, or to wreak vengeance. More often it is the repinings and longings of passionate love that keep it from its rest. In märchen and ballad the ghost of the lover comes to complain that the tears which his betrothed sheds nightly fill his shroud with blood; when she smiles, it is filled with rose leaves. The mother steals from the grave to hap and comfort her orphan children; their harsh stepmother neglects and ill-treats them, and their exceeding bitter and desolate cry has penetrated beneath the sod, and reached the dead ear. In The Clerk's Sons o' Owsenford, and in that singular fragment of the same creepy theme, recovered by Scott, The Wife of Usher's Well, it is the yearning of the living mother that brings the dead sons back to their home:

'"Blaw up the fire, my maidens,Bring water from the well!For a' my house shall feast this nicht,Since my three sons are well."'

The revenants, silent guests with staring eyes, wait and warm themselves by the fireside, while the 'carline wife' ministers to their wants, and spreads her 'gay mantle' over them to keep them from the cold, until their time comes:

'"The cock doth craw, the day doth daw,The channerin' worm doth chide;Gin we be missed out o' our placeA sair pain we must bide.""Lie still, be still a little wee while,Lie still but if we may;Gin my mother should miss us when she wakes,She 'll gae mad, ere it be day."O it 's they 've taen up their mother's mantle,And they 've hung it on a pin;"O lang may ye hing, my mother's mantle,Ere ye hap us again."'

A chill air as from the charnel-house seems to breathe upon us while reading the lines; the coldness, the darkness, and the horror of death have never been painted for us with more terrible power than in the 'Wiertz Gallery' of the old balladists.

We feel this also in the ballads of the type of Sweet William and May Margaret, quoted in Beaumont and Fletcher's Knight of the Burning Pestle, where the dead returns to claim back a plighted word; and at the same time we feel the strength of the perfect love that triumphs over death and casts out fear:

'"Is there any room at your head, Willie,Or any room at your feet,Or any room at your side, Willie,Wherein that I may creep?"'

How miserably the poetical taste of the early part of last century misappreciated the spirit of the ancient ballad, preferring the dross to the fine gold, and tricking out the 'terrific old Scottish tale,' as Sir Walter Scott calls it, in meretricious ornament, may be seen by comparing the original copies with that 'elegant' composition of David Mallet, William and Margaret, so praised and popular in its day, in which every change made is a disfigurement of the nature of an outrage. Read the summons of the ghost, still 'naked of ornament and simple':

'"O sweet Marg'ret, O dear Marg'ret!I pray thee speak to me;Gie me my faith and troth, Marg'ret,As I gae it to thee,"'

along with the 'improved' version:

'"Awake!" she cried, "thy true love calls,Come from her midnight grave;Now let thy pity hear the maidThy love refused to save."'

Of a long antiquity most of these Mythological Ballads must be, if not in their actual phraseology, in the dark superstitions they embody and in the pathetic glimpses they afford us of the thoughts and fears and hopes of the men and women of the days of long ago – the days before feudalism; the days, as some inquisitors of the ballad assure us, when religion was a kind of fetichism or ancestor worship, when the laws were the laws of the tribe or family, and when the cannibal feast may have been among the customs of the race. We cannot find a time when this inheritance of legend was not old; when it was not sung, and committed to memory, and handed down to later generations in some rude rhyme. The leading 'types' were in the wallet of Autolycus; and he describes certain of them with a seasoning of his grotesque humour, to his simple country audience. There were the well-attested tale of the Usurer's Wife, a ballad sung, as ballads are wont, 'to a very doleful tune' – obviously a form of the Supernatural Birth; and the story, true as it is pitiful, of the fish that turned to woman, and then back again to fish, in which he that runs may read an example from the Mermaid Cycle. They are to be found to-day, often in debased and barely recognisable guise, in the hands of the peripatetic ballad-mongers who still haunt fairs and sing in the streets, and in the memories of multitudes of country folks who know scarce any other literature bearing the magic trademark of Old Romance.